This Photo of the Day, taken in Arches National Park, Utah is titled “Eye of the Beholder” and comes from Gadling Flickr pool member Terra_Tripper
Arches National Park has over 2,000 natural stone arches, pinnacles, fins and giant balanced rocks. Located just outside of Moab, Utah, the 76,679 acre red rock wonderland was originally a National Monument then redesignated as a National Park.
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Chicago is a world-class city but there are many occasions when those of us that live here want out, at least for the weekend. And while the city is a terrific flight hub, quick and dirty road trip options are limited, especially if you’ve lived in the city for a long time and have exhausted most of the choice destinations. A few years ago, my wife and I took a hiking excursion to Wisconsin’s Devil’s Lake State Park, about an hour northwest of Madison, and vowed to return for a camping trip one day.
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We finally got our chance the last weekend of September, and were blessed with glorious sunny weather and blue skies to complement the changing leaves. Planning a camping trip for a family of four feels like preparing for war though, and three hours into the drive with our are-we-there-yet sons, ages 3 and 5, our nerves and patience were shot.
It was about 5:30 p.m. and we were hoping to score one of the first-come-first-serve tent sites at Devil’s Lake State Park, as all their reserved spots were full. We were blindly following our GPS to the park when Julie, our friendly Australian GPS navagatrix said, “Turn right onto the Merrimac Ferry.” We were all excited to be only 10 miles away from the park and thought we’d be there in 15 minutes, but all of the sudden we were sitting in a fairly long line of cars waiting to get on a ferry.
As soon as we pulled in, more cards pulled in the line right behind us, so it wasn’t possible to back out, and the GPS indicated that any detour would be time consuming. At first, I was irate because I thought we’d have to pay for the ferry and was concerned that by the time we found a campsite, we’d have to erect our tent in the dark.
My wife asked the two cars in front of us how much the ferry cost but alas, they were also following their GPS’s as well and were just as clueless as we were. But the ferry turned out to be free, the line moved quickly and we took the opportunity to get out of our car and enjoy the fresh air and the views of the Wisconsin River. The odd thing is that almost everyone remained inside their parked cars; both in line and on the ferry itself, despite the fact that it was a beautiful early fall evening.
Tent sites at the park were all booked up but we made it to a more expensive and less salubrious campground a couple miles outside the park just before darkness fell. (Tip: book way in advance to get a $17 per night tent site at Devil’s Lake S.P.; it’s the best deal in the area by far) Nevertheless, we were still able to enjoy Devil’s Lake in all of its early fall splendor.
Devil’s Lake is huge. It’s a 360-acre lake that is flanked by 500-foot bluffs. In the late 19th century, the park was home to a number of resort hotels and a train line brought tourists in from all over the Midwest. These days, camping is your only option in the park itself but there are 29 miles of hiking trails to explore, including portions of the 1,000-plus-mile Ice Age National Scenic Trail. I’m partial to the West Bluff trail, which starts near the north entrance to the park and offers a good workout and some incredible views down over the lake.
We were prepared to love Devil’s Lake, but the very pleasant surprise of the weekend was Baraboo’s eminently loveable old-school downtown, which features two good bookstores, one new, one used, a classic, circa 1915 cinema, a free zoo and a host of enticing restaurants and shops. The Ringling Brothers put the town on the map by basing their circus there and that legacy lives on at the Circus World Museum, which is part museum, part working circus.
As we lingered at a Saturday morning farmers market outside the town’s stately courthouse, an older man in a flannel shirt noticed my camera and asked if we wanted to know more about the town. The man, who introduced himself as Gary, was hanging out with his brother Rick on a bench, and I had the distinct impression that they sit there every day.
“Do you remember JFK?” Gary asked us.
“Of course,” I said, wondering where he was going with the question.
“He walked right up those steps over there and shook our hands here when he was campaigning for president,” he said as though the event had just happened recently.
After shooting the breeze with Gary and Rick, we checked out the Al Ringling Cinema, which was built for $100,000 in 1915, during the height of the silent film era. It’s a beautifully restored old cinema that still hosts live theater, movies and a variety of other events. I ambled in for a look and a woman named Charlene, who works there, told me that only one member of the Ringling family still lives in the area, and he’s in prison for sexually assaulting a 10-year-old boy.
Nevertheless, the town still clings to the Ringling connection – there are several Ringling Brothers banners posted around town, and it’s still a great place to visit. If you want to take an alternate route back to the Chicago area, consider a stop off in New Glarus, a handsome little town founded by Swiss immigrants from the canton of Glarus in the 1840s, on your way home. The town retains its distinctive Swiss character and is situated right off of the Sugar River State Trail, a really nice bike path.
We happened to be in New Glarus for their annual Oktoberfest, which on its final day featured, oddly enough, a roots and blues band but no German music. But they did have New Glarus Oktoberfest beer, which was a sweet way to end a glorious early fall weekend in Wisconsin.
IF YOU GO: The drive to Baraboo takes about 3-1/2 hours from Chicago, depending on traffic and where you start. We stayed at a private campground near the park, which charges $28 for tent sites or $31 if you use a credit card (almost double the price of Devil’s Lake State Park). I can’t recommend the place because the tent sites are very close to each other and the owner is a bit of a crank.
Try to get a spot at Devil’s Lake State Park itself, if you can. Reservations are hard to come by on the weekend, but each day they also set aside 54 first-come-first-served spots, so get there early. For good, inexpensive Mexican food with gigantic portions, go to Los Nopales, and try Jen’s Alpine Café for a very good, if time consuming, breakfast. It’s an old-school place right downtown that’s been around since the 1930s.
The last thing you want to hear after midnight in a deserted campground is footsteps near your tent. Wait, I take that back: the last thing you want to hear is a grizzly bear growling or, worse yet, actually ripping apart your tent with its teeth. But footsteps are a close second or third.
I was camping at Emerald Lake State Park in Vermont last week with my wife and two little boys and, after a lovely weekend when the campground was full, the weather turned rainy and the place was deserted save for one other hearty family.
It was thirty minutes past midnight on Monday night and I was lying in our tent, trying to fall asleep, while my wife and boys were already slumbering next to me. It was poring rain outside, but we were nice and dry and the melodic sound of raindrops pelting our tent had me in a deeply relaxed, all-is-right-with-the-world frame of mind. That is, until I heard some rummaging, or was that footsteps near our tent?It was our fifth night of camping on this trip and the prior evenings had all been blissfully quiet but at this moment my mind raced back to what the ranger told us when we checked into the park two days before.
“Just keep all your food and trash secured because we’ve had some black bears rummaging around the dumpsters,” he said, ominously.
But surely bears don’t like to roam around looking for snacks this late at night in a downpour, do they? I sure as hell hoped not, but moments later, I heard more rummaging and footsteps, this time even closer to the tent. We had met the only other family still in our camping area and my wife had bumped into them in the bathroom brushing their teeth hours before. Why would they be out walking around in the poring rain at 12:30 a.m.?
I pretended like I didn’t know my wife was asleep and called out to her across my slumbering boys, “Jen, did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” she replied, more than a little annoyed. “I was sleeping!”
“Never mind,” I said, feeling guilty. “It was probably nothing.”
But then we both heard the noises again and a moment later a bright light pored in through our tent.
“What the hell is that?” I said, before unzipping the tent and discovering a blinding spotlight perhaps 100 feet away, streaming right into our tent. I couldn’t tell what it was because the light was too bright.
“It must be a park ranger out on patrol,” Jen ventured.
“You think they have park rangers out on patrol in the middle of the night, in a driving rain, just shining spotlights in people’s tents?” I asked, half sarcastic, half hoping she was right.
I pondered this prospect and, in my increasingly paranoid state concluded that the only reason why a park ranger would be out this late at night, in the rain, shining bright lights, would be if they’d had a bear sighting.
“Maybe they’re coming to warn us that a big storm is coming and we have to evacuate,” Jen speculated. “I think there’s a phone number on the sheet they gave us when we checked in, maybe one of us should go look for it in the car.”
I wasn’t stoked about venturing out into the rain, especially if there was a bear or an ax murderer on the loose, but when I saw my wife jump up and get out of the tent, I followed in solidarity.
She called the number on the map we’d been given but it was a recorded message. If a bear is eating you, press 1. If a friend or loved one just had their head chopped off by a homicidal maniac press 2, or something on these lines. There was no possibility to speak to a live person, and after she got off the phone, the spotlight came back into our tent.
“I’m going to get the padlocks,” I said, referring to two tiny little luggage size Master locks I had in my suitcase, which was in the trunk of our car.
After I came back to the tent, dripping wet with Master locks in hand, my very logical wife gave me a reality check.
“You think your going to keep a bear or any other intruder out with those little things?” she asked. “I’m not letting you lock us all in here, you’ll lose the key and then when we need to go the bathroom we’ll be trapped.”
I knew she was right and as the spotlight disappeared I ventured hopefully that we should just try to get back to sleep and hope for the best. But it’s hard to sleep when you’re in a paranoid frame of mind. There’s a good reason why there are so many horror movies involving campers – when you’re out in the woods, sleeping in a tent, you’re totally vulnerable.
I couldn’t help but think of all the stories I’d read over the years about people being eaten by bears, robbed or killed while camping or hiking. In my mind, I know that camping isn’t much riskier than staying in a hotel, but when you hear noises and lights late on a rainy night in an isolated place, it’s hard to be rational.
Eventually I fell asleep and when I woke up, I immediately unzipped the tent screen and saw a van parked about 100 feet away where the spotlight had been coming from.
“Good lord,” I said. “It must have just been these people in their van arriving.”
“Who checks into a campground after midnight in the rain?” my wife asked.
I was determined to find out, so I walked over to their van, unsure if I was going to say something or just have a look at the people who’d scared us half to death. As I approached the van, which was expensive looking and had New Jersey plates, I saw a woman, who appeared to be in her 40s but no tent.
“Morning,” I ventured, wondering if she’d have any explanation for me.
“Morning,” she said, and before I had to decide if I was going to ask about last night she immediately apologized. “I am so sorry about last night. We got caught in the storm and needed a place to sleep. I hope we didn’t scare you.”
I momentarily thought about playing the role of tough guy and saying, “Scared? Who us? Hell no,” but I couldn’t pull it off.
“Honestly, we were scared – we heard the noises and couldn’t imagine who or what it was, in the rain that late, and then with the lights shining into our tent, well …”
“I am really sorry about that,” she repeated, and I assured her it was no big deal, but I couldn’t help but wonder why they hadn’t just gone to one of the motels right near the campground.
She and her companion exited the campground 15 minutes before the ranger arrived at 9 a.m., thus avoiding paying the $16 fee, and we packed up our soggy gear and checked out a couple hours later. As we drove up to the ranger booth at the exit, I recounted part of our experience and asked what one is supposed to do in such a situation.
“In the bathroom, there’s a sign that says if there’s a disturbance past ten, call the ranger immediately, don’t wait till morning to report it, but no one answered,” I said.
“We need to change the signs,” he said. “You’re supposed to come down here to the ranger house and report it in person.”
“Do you allow people to check in overnight?” I asked.
“We strongly discourage it,” he said.
At the campground we had stayed in on Cape Cod the previous week, they actually had a gate that was locked down at 10 p.m., so it wasn’t just discouraged, it was impossible.
On a rainy night, when you’re lying in your tent in your underwear, the prospect of getting in the car and driving a couple miles to report a disturbance in person is not a very appetizing prospect. But then again, I guess it beats lying awake in your tent, dreaming about bears and Freddy Krueger.
[Photos by Tambako on Flickr, and Dave Seminara, video by Dave Seminara]
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can put up a tent and those who cannot. I’m not proud to admit that I’m part of the later group. I’m the youngest of six children and by the time I was born, my parents had given up camping for good. I wasn’t exposed to Boy Scouts and never learned a thing about camping, fishing, survival skills or the Great Outdoors.
So when my wife and I found ourselves shopping for camping gear at REI in preparation for a camping trip to Cape Cod, I was ready to pay $70 more for a tent that had only 11 setup steps, compared to 15 on a cheaper model. But my wife, who was a science major in college, is good at putting things together, so we bought the cheaper, Big Agnes Big House 4 tent, and I quietly hoped not to be exposed for the pathetic tent-setup guy that I am.
In a year when my family has been traveling nonstop since April 1, we’ve stayed in almost every type of accommodation, save a tent. We used to enjoy camping, years ago, but haven’t ventured out into the great outdoors for an overnight stay since our first child was born in 2007.We’ve always wanted to visit Cape Cod, but when I looked into room rates a few weeks ago and saw that even mediocre quality hotels on the Cape were charging two, three and even four hundred dollars per night, I figured it was time for our kids to get their first taste of the camping lifestyle.
So we bought some new sleeping bags, the Big Agnes tent, and some REI self-inflating camping pads, and piled our two little boys and all our gear into the family trickster for the drive to the Sweetwater Forest Campground in Brewster, a graceful little town on the north (bay) side of Cape Cod. We wanted to camp at nearby Nickerson State Park, but since they charge just $12 per tent site, they tend to fill up fast and we couldn’t get in. Sweetwater charges $35 per tent site, which is pricey for camping, but it sure beats paying $300 per night for a hotel room.
We were given a choice of two sites, and spent more time debating which one to take than Union and Confederate generals spent preparing for the Battle of Gettysburg. One site had far more privacy but also had lots of protruding tree branches on the only level ground suitable for a tent and both of us were reluctant to make a call for fear of being scapegoated for a bad night’s sleep, either from noisy neighbors or the protruding branches.
Eventually we settled on the more private site and my wife methodically went to work putting the Big House up. I stood around and did what I was told but contributed essentially nothing to the endeavor, though my wife was kind enough to pretend as though I wasn’t completely useless.
“Here, use your strength to pull that through,” she’d say. Or, “Why don’t you hammer these down?”
But we all knew that if I had to put the thing up, it would have taken hours, with several failed attempts, plenty of cursing and a bit of soul searching. If I can’t figure out how to put something together upon first glance, without consulting instructions, it probably won’t get done. My wife had the tent up in about 25 minutes flat, and before we knew it the boys were wrestling in the tent.
We made some S’mores at our campfire, but James, my 3-year-old, insisted on eating the chocolate bars a la carte.
At bedtime, he seemed comfortable enough in his kid’s sleeping bag, but was still a bit confused by the whole endeavor.
“Is this our house?” he asked, perhaps wondering if we were planning to live in the tent permanently. “Where is our hotel?”
As we tried to get the boys to settle down and go to sleep, my wife noticed a bunch of unused tabs on the ceiling of the tent and we wondered what on earth they were for. No matter how good you are at tent assembly, there will invariably be some unused parts that cause you needless panic.
Prior to the trip, I had nightmare visions of the boys keeping us up all night with requests for water, bathroom breaks, and God knows what else – but amazingly, I was the only bonehead that didn’t get a good night’s sleep. I’d left the cap on my sleeping pad open and all the air had seeped out of the bloody thing, so I woke up 18 times in the night with a sore back and a cranky neck.
The kids were sprawled all around the tent, half over my wife and me, and not remotely inside their sleeping bags, but they did fine. On our second night, I was battling a bad stomach – and you don’t really want to be a fourth mile away from the nearest bathroom in that circumstance, but with a little Pepto, I got by. That night, I made sure my pad was inflated properly and I slept like a log.
In the morning, we were awakened by a chorus of birds, frogs and crickets, and the day’s first light that crept in through our tent. Ordinarily, I consider noise and light unwanted intrusions in the morning, but greeting the day from my tent, both seemed pleasing. Even better, I enjoyed rolling over and seeing the three people who mean the most to me sprawled in and out of a jumble of sleeping bags in our Big House.
Is it possible to get a decent night sleep in a tent with two toddlers? Believe it or not, yes it is. My 5-year-old son, Leo, told us he was hooked on the camping lifestyle.
“I want to sleep in a tent every night,” he said, right before asking us if we could download a kids movie on my wife’s Kindle.
The price of road trips, what it takes to make them happen and what we do along the way have changed over the years. Not all that long ago, iPads were not the mobile way to entertain children as DVD players ruled the roads and mini-vans of family vacations. Going back further in time, we find camping that was nearly free, a Burger value meal cost almost ten times less and the price of gas would not have been a consideration by today’s standards.
This infographic from Baby Authority illustrates just how much has changed in 50+ years of road trips and makes us wonder what traveling the road will be line 50+ years from now.